


Snow

by dawittiest



Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Birth, Child Neglect, Gen, Implied/Referenced Infanticide, Postpartum Depression, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-17 19:44:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13666005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawittiest/pseuds/dawittiest
Summary: The miracle of birth through the eyes of “Margaret” Grace Murdock.





	Snow

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote a ficlet for the sprint challenge on Daredevil discord and then ran with it (the title is the prompt.) Season 3 is going to invalidate all my Maggie headcanons but whatever. This fic was inspired largely by Waid’s _Original Sin_ Daredevil issues.
> 
> Thanks to DancingPlague for beta!

Baby Murdock is born at 3 a.m. on February 11th weighting exactly 5.5 pounds.

Doctors tell her he’s a bit on the small side. Doctors tell her a lot of things. Grace sits in her gown stained with blood and feces and organ bits and listens to the gentle drone without hearing anything. Her brain is filled with cotton candy snow. It was such a beautiful winter day.

They put the baby in her arms. Grace saw a skinned hamster once when she was a girl, all red and flabby muscles. It looks like that. It’s all covered with slime and chunks of body gunk.

“That’s your son,” they say.

Grace looks at it. The baby’s crying, its gape mouth an O and the little muzzle twisted up like in agony.

“That’s my son,” she says.

Jack is crying too, silent tears streaking his happy-scrunched face.

“He has your eyes,” he whispers.

Its eyes look like baby mole eyes.

“He was inside of me,” Grace says.

She thought the baby would look more like a part of her. It just looks like a baby.

Grace gives it to Jack.

“We could give you a minute,” a doctor says.

Grace looks at her.

“Why?”

“If you want… to celebrate the moment. As a family.”

Jack’s tear-brimmed eyes look up at her over the baby. He’s holding it like a delicate china.

“I’m feeling the contractions,” Grace says. The pain stabs in her abdomen through the snow-fog.

“Okay,” the doctor says. “We can birth the placenta now.”

The doctor has to lean her entire weight on Grace to push it out. Grace grinds her teeth until her ears ring, but she thinks, this is right. This is how birth should be.

It comes out with a sickly squelch of blood. Grace gets a look at it: red-black, clotted oily thing. Vile.

“That was inside of me,” she says.

But she thinks, that’s right. That thing was inside of her.

 

The baby cries and cries. The nurses, Jack, they walk with it from one end of the hospital corridor to the other rocking it in their arms, but the baby won’t sleep. It’s screaming like police sirens. Grace’s brain aches under the snow.

“It’s no good he came in the night,” Grace says to Jack. “Night babies don’t sleep well. That’s what my mother said. He’ll be restless till dawn. I was a night baby.”

“Maybe he’s hungry,” the nurses say.

Grace is handed the baby and she puts it to her breast. It’s still wailing. Grace takes its tiny skull in her palm and presses it against her engorged nipple. The baby keeps crying and tries to crane back its weak little head. Its spit-slick mouth smacks her breast but doesn’t latch on. The screams get shriller and louder.

Grace hands the baby back to the nurse.

“It won’t suck,” she says.

Jack takes it from the nurse with special care.

“Maybe we should keep on trying,” he says. “It can, I heard it can sometimes take a kid a moment to figure out how to suck, right? Keep trying, Grace.”

Grace keeps on trying.

The baby moves its head as much as it can. As if it’s shaking no. It screams like it’s being burned in hellfire.

“My head hurts,” Grace says and gives the baby to the nurse. “Feed it formula.”

 

“Matthew,” Jack says. “After my grandfather.”

Grace looks at the baby. It doesn’t look like a Matthew.

But it’s a baby. It doesn’t look like anything.

“What do you think, Grace?” Jack asks her, glancing up from the bundle in his arms. There are tears in his eyes again. Grace blinks.

“Alright,” she says.

“What do you think about middle name?” Jacks asks. “He should have a middle name. It’s, like, proper and shit. Like a doctor name or something. He can be a doctor.” He looks at her, a frown between his eyebrows. “Grace?”

Grace frowns. Her brain is enveloped in the thick layer of cotton snow.

“Okay.”

Jack frowns deeper.

“Do you want to choose the name?”

Grace looks at him.

“Just… say a name, Grace,” Jack says, something high in his voice. “Any name.”

There are so many names.

“I don’t know,” Grace says.

“What about Michael,” Jack says, his voice getting urgent. “It’s a pretty name. Do you like Michael?”

She doesn’t know how she feels about Michael.

“Alright,” she says.

Jack pinches his mouth.

“Matthew Michael Murdock,” he says, looking down at the baby. His face goes soft. “Matty.”

He’s quiet for a while. Then he looks up from the bundle.

“Do you want to hold him?”

Grace looks at the baby. It’s not crying now. But its face is twisted, like it will cry any second. Twisted and red, like a deviling.

“I’m tired,” she says.

Jack’s face flickers and there’s something wrong in it. Something dark.

“Okay,” he says, soft, too soft. “Get some rest, Grace.”

 

She goes to pee on cottony legs. Duck feet. She squats over the seat, lighting pain shooting up her abdomen and lower. Blood trickles down between her legs. Grace pats herself dry the best she can, soft like dabbing rouge. Before she flushes she glances inside. The toilet water is sick pink. Dark clots swim in it.

She touches the flappy lips, pushes her finger in gingerly. Sharp pinprick of pain. Pulsating and ripped like a wound. She takes away her hand.

The entire body throbs, muscle-deep ache like a second heartbeat. The breasts are swollen, heavy. She puts them in her palms and they spill between her fingers. Jack says she has child’s hands; she always could fit her breasts perfectly in her cupped palms. She lets them go – they hang, pulled to the ground like Play-Doh or an old woman’s breasts.

She flushes the toilet and goes to wash her hands. All the body parts are puffed and stretched out of shape, except the hands. They shriveled, knobbly joints and threadbare leather skin. The water runs and runs blurring their angles. The arms stretch far away.

She looks up. The face in the mirror is gray, dark purple bruises under the eyes. The eyes are huge and shine like frost. Gaunt, her mother would say.

Grace shakes her head. The snow must be stuffy for her skull. It feels like it’s spilling outside.

 

Whispers. Jack and the doctors are whispering again. Their voices muffled.

Grace doesn’t try to hear over the snow.

She puts the swollen feet on the floor. Takes a step and takes another. The world is swaying, a gentle lull. She feels she’s drifting. She feels she’s wrapped in white gauze.

It’s snowing outside. The snow is spreading. She puts a wiry branch-hand on the window glass; cool. The cold tingles on the fingertips, icy syringe into her veins. Her hand peeks out of the snowy blanket.

Grace opens the window. Wind’s icy palms slip under her gown. Snowflakes spin in the air like dandruff that’s painful to the touch. She closes her eyes, feels her skin ache and numb from the frost. Deadened but raw. She opens her mouth, inhales a sharp gulp of cold.

A nurse slams the window.

“What are you doing, Mrs. Murdock?” she says. “You’re gonna get the flu. Please go back to bed.”

“I just wanna feel the air,” Grace says. The snow blanket falls back on her head.

 

They go back to the apartment. They bring the baby with them.

Jack has it in a sling, like a broken arm. He puts his hand on her lower back; Grace toddles forward on duck feet. There are stairs and stairs and more stairs, and the legs she’s walking on shrink to the size of a little girl’s. The baby starts screaming.

Then they’re in the apartment. Grace wanders from room to room, trailing her fingers on the walls.

“Grace?”

Grace turns around. It’s Jack.

She blinks. Of course it’s Jack. It’s only Jack here.

Jack is staring at her; his unfocused face dances before Grace. Her eyelashes are clumped with snowflakes.

“Is everything alright?”

Jack’s voice sounds far away.

“My head hurts,” she says. “I wanna lie down.”

Jack keeps staring at her. She can’t catch the look on his face.

“Are you sure you’re alright?”

It’s hard to sort her thoughts from the snow.

“I’m just tired,” she says.

 

“Do you want to give Matty a bath?”

Jack. He’s standing in the bedroom door.

“Grace?” The bed sinks under him. Jack takes a numb, ice-cold hand in his big fist. Her hand. “You… you haven’t done no stuff with Matty, mom stuff. I know… I know you’re tired but. Just, maybe give it a chance? I know you’ll love it.”

She looks up at him.

“Okay,” she says.

Jack exhales.

“Okay, good, that’s—good. Real good.”

In the bathroom, she turns on the water knob and puts a plastic wash basin under it. The water gushes, lulling white noise. Lulling like the snow.

She shakes her head. The wash basin is spilling over.

Grace turns off the water. She wipes her palms on her stretched-out home pants and goes to the bedroom. She stands there for a moment. Her brain is fresh snow-white.

The baby. She was going to fetch the baby.

It’s lying in its baby cage – cot. It’s not sleeping – night babies, they never sleep right – and it’s not screaming at the moment either. It’s lying with its shrunk rodent paws curled into its body and looking at her with dark, burning eyes.

Grace picks it up. Its muzzle contracts, like it’s about to scream, but then doesn’t. She brings it to the bathroom and strips it down to its ugly hellspawn flesh-skin. The baby lets out a few grunt-mewls. Grace puts a finger in its mouth and it sucks on it, quieting. She lowers it slowly into the water; its maw puckers open, releasing the finger.

There’s too much water. Grace has to keep the baby’s skull up with her palms. It lolls its eyes around madly, gaping like a fish.

The water is warm. It laps at her skin, not quite sinking into the flesh. Almost like her snow cocoon. She pulls a hand out of the water. The surface tears and the ripples expand and release the hand – and then it’s out, not under water. Cold. She punctures the water surface with fingertips; the warm swallows them. Part in part out. She can’t pinpoint the break-line.

She blinks. Little hands are thrashing in the water. The baby’s muzzle is under. Bubbles pop from its mouth, up to the surface.

 _It wants to rise, it is still struggling._ Who said that? It was about a drowning baby. No, not drowning. Drowned.

The baby’s gulping in big mouthfuls. Cleansed of dirt from the inside and out like in holy water.

“Grace? Is everything—”

Jack enters and stops. Grace shakes the snow out of her head. The baby’s convulsing. It’s drowning.

“Jesus, _fuck_ —”

Grace steps back and Jack fishes out the baby. It’s coughing and crying, its face even redder than before. The deviling. Jack wraps it in a towel, jouncing it gently against his chest. It’s screaming its tiny lungs out.

Jack turns to her.

“ _What the hell, Grace?_ ”

She remembers suddenly: Margaret, Gretchen, wailing for her devil-baby she drowned. No, it wasn’t a devil-baby. It was just a baby.

“I don’t know,” she says.

Jack stares at her, his eyes fever-bright and wide.

“You… you can’t be near Matty, Grace. There’s something—I’m sorry, I don’t know—you’re not fit to be around a kid.”

A kid; the baby. The baby that is still crying. She looks at it. Has it been there crying this whole time?

Jack is staring at her.

“Okay,” she says.

She stumbles through the door and out, out, into the winter air.

 

She’s wading through snow. The streets are frost-sharp and hostile. She doesn’t know where to go. She has nowhere to go now.

Where do nowhere people go?

 

Shelter is a right name. She needs a shelter now.

She huddles on duck feet behind a flock of people. Swarms of cattle people. She flitters between them, blinking against the snow-fog. She’s inside and warm but it’s still snowing.

“Miss? Miss, are you alright?”

She turns to the voice. A nun is looking at her. Frowning.

“What?” she says.

The nun’s face contorts with a deep frown.

“First time?”

She stares.

“Yes,” she says.

The nun takes her to a shoebox office room and sits her on a narrow plastic chair in front of a desk. She looks at her nails, bitten to blood. Behind the door she can hear tumult, busy people. She pictures rows and rows of cots, trying to sleep through all the snoring and coughing.

She never liked crowds. She doesn’t know what she likes now.

“Miss? I asked your name.”

She sees a face in the snow. Underwater muzzle. Small hands pushing a baby under until it stops struggling. Gretchen looking to the sky one last time. _Judgement of God! I give myself to you. Save me!_

“Margaret,” she says. “My name is Margaret.”

**Author's Note:**

> Having a nervous breakdown and becoming homeless – Matt takes more after his mother than you would’ve thought! The quoted lines are taken from Goethe’s _Faust_ as translated by Walter Kaufmann. Yes, I’m that pretentious.
> 
> Please feed me comments.


End file.
